President's Message
Self-Care...Keep it Going!
A Note from Sheila St. Cyr, MS, RN, NPD-BC
My fellow Nursing Professional Development (NPD) Practitioners –
Last month, nurses were celebrated during Nurses Month. The American Nurses Association (ANA), emphasizing the evergreen theme of “Nurses Make a Difference,” highlighted self-care in Week 1 (2022). If your inbox was like mine, there were many messages during that week on the topic of self-care. Self-care, though, is not a “one week out of the year” topic to focus on. It is a topic and habit that needs to be discussed and performed every day. As nurses and NPD practitioners, we are in a unique position to keep this very important topic at the forefront. We need to do this not only for ourselves but also for the healthcare professionals we work with.
I was so excited to listen to a recent episode of the NPD Forecast podcast with Danene Coroneos-Shannon, PhD, MSEd, RN, NPD-BC, NC-BC, MCHES, on Wellness & Health Promotion (Bodine & Russell, 2022). Danene made so many excellent points that we should all take note of and place into our arsenal of self-care tactics. For me, the most important point of wellness is very similar to the instructions we hear when traveling by plane. We are instructed that if we are traveling with small children, we should put on our own oxygen mask first before assisting others with theirs. Each of us has a responsibility to practice self-care in order to help others do so.
The first tactic that Danene pointed out was the need to discover what works for you in maintaining health and wellness. In fact, Danene was quick to respond that we need to have several different techniques we can pull from, depending on the situation. Another item she noted was that we each need to know our triggers. The concept of triggers is not new to me. I have served on a peer assistance committee through the Oklahoma Board of Nursing, working with recovering nurses that are in the structured process of getting their license back in good standing. I had not really thought about identifying triggers in one’s quest for self-care, though. We all need to know our triggers that would lead us to be “out of balance.” Triggers could potentially include busy family/work schedules, loss/grief/anxiety, working overtime to cover needs, or working an extremely stressful shift, to name a few. If we know what our triggers are, we can work to lessen some of them while learning how to manage others. I have experienced some of these triggers in the last several months. If you have not had a chance to listen to this podcast, take some time to do so. There is so much information packed in, including a chance to participate in a self-care technique at the end. Perhaps a version of it would need to be added to your toolkit of techniques.
Nolan (2022) recently highlighted another important aspect of our journey of self-care in the American Nurse Journal. The article focuses on the concept of empathy being critical in the role of a leader, but that a leader needs to practice self-empathy first. As nurses, we connect with our patients using empathy, but we need to turn that process internally and focus on ourselves. Our bodies are very good at communicating how we are feeling, but we don’t always listen to or heed the signs and symptoms. Nolan pointed out that we need to ask ourselves questions such as, “What am I feeling?” or “What do I need?” as part of the self-care process. It is okay for us to identify what we need and make time to obtain whatever it is that is missing. We owe that to ourselves.
Finally, I think it is powerful that a new standard was added to the Nursing Professional Development: Scope & Standards of Practice (Harper & Maloney, 2022) related to health teaching and promotion. There are eight competencies under this standard for NPD practitioners, two of which are for the NPD specialist. The release of the 4th edition of the Scope and Standards is also quite timely, given the recent release of priorities and recommendations from the Nurse Staffing Think Tank. The Think Tank is a group of diverse healthcare stakeholders from the frontline up to the C-suite. This group convened to discuss and provide strategies for the current nurse staffing crisis. Two of the priority topics included in the Think Tank’s Executive Summary (2022) were the need for a healthy work environment and to address the stress injury continuum. For additional information on the Nurse Staffing Think Tank, see the article in this month’s TrendLines titled Actionable Strategies to Mitigate the Nurse Staffing Crisis. Now is the time to take our seat at the table and assist in measures to mitigate the nurse staffing crisis.
I encourage each of you to continually practice self-care and take even a few minutes every day to focus on your needs so that you can work to meet others’ needs in the area of health and wellness. You are worth it!
All my best,
Sheila St. Cyr, MS, RN, NPD-BC
President
Association for Nursing Professional Development
References
American Nurses Association. (2022). Nurses month week 1. https://nursesmonth.org/nurses-month-2022-week-1/
Bodine, J., & Russell, J. (Hosts). (2022, May 5). NPD forecast: Wellness & health promotion [Audio podcast episode]. In NPD Sound Bites. Association for Nursing Professional Development.
Harper, M. G., & Maloney, P. (Eds). (2022). Nursing professional development: Scope & standards of practice (4th ed.). Association for Nursing Professional Development.
Nolan, S. (2022). Leading with self-empathy. American Nurse Journal, 17(2). https://www.myamericannurse.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/an2-Leadership-111.pdf
Partners for Nurse Staffing Think Tank. (2022). Nurse staffing think tank: Priority topics and recommendations.
https://www.nursingworld.org/~49940b/globalassets/practiceandpolicy/nurse-staffing/nurse-staffing-think-tank-recommendation.pdf